Atheism or Morality: What’ll it Be?

People talk about rights all the time; about good and evil, about right and wrong, about what one “ought” to do. Whatever society, whatever culture, wherever you go, everyone alway has something to say on the matter. The problem with this is that many of these people are atheist. But, of course, to them, this is not a problem. Many people feel that they can be perfectly moral, upright, good citizens and still be atheist. This is true, however, these terms have little to no meaning to one who fully and truly embraces atheism, as opposed to the willy-nilly, half-hearted atheists which one encounters so readily in our modern “civilized” society.

The problem is that modern man wants to eat his cake and have it too. Or, to put it another way, he has grown too intelligent for his own good. His advanced learning has let him believe that he has figured out all of the great mysteries of the world, and that science will solve the remainder of the unknowns and cure the rest of his problems. In that, the “modern intellectual” has discarded God, considering it to be a outdated, unscientific hypothesis. Well and good. But despite his great sophistication, he remains very childish and non-committal in his worldviews: modern man still wants to behave as though there was a God, that is, he still talks about Right and Wrong as if they had an a priori existence, and still makes a point of “doing the right thing.”

This is exactly what Sartre talked about in his essay, The Humanism of Existentialism:

“[There is ] a certain kind of secular ethics which would like to abolish God with the least possible expense. About 1880, some French teachers tried to set up a secular ethics which went something like this: God is a useless and costly hypothesis; we are discarding it; but, meanwhile, in order for there to be an ethics, a society, a civilization, it is essential that certain values be taken seriously and that they be considered as having an a priori existence. It must be obligatory, a priori, to be honest, not to lie, not to beat your wife, to have children, etc., etc. So we’re going to try a little device which will make it possible to show that values exist all the same, inscribed in a heaven of ideas, though otherwise God does not exist. In other words – and this, I believe, is the tendency of everything called reformism in France– nothing will be changed if God does not exist. We shall find ourselves with the same norms of honesty, progress, and humanism, and we shall have made of God an outdated hypothesis which will peacefully die off by itself” (2).

Considering this, nothing has really changed since 1880. There are still atheists everywhere who want God dead, but want an absolute ethical standard to remain alive. This is especially evident with left-winged atheists, who are concerned about homosexual rights, animal rights, the general rights of the people, environmentalism, and who are proponents of the poor and of minorities. Question one of them, and they will argue passionately about the aforementioned issues as if such things were self-evident and absolute.

But wait just a minute: who gives these rights? Who bestows them? Certainly not God, since that is an outdated hypothesis. What then? Unfortunately for the atheist, God’s shoes are not going to be that easy to fill, and we are left without a source for an a priori Good. Sartre continues:

“The existentialist, on the contrary, thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exist […] because the fact is we are on a plane where there are only men.”

And because there are only men on this plane, it becomes man who is deciding what is right and wrong, and because man is not absolute, neither are these judgments. Morality is rendered arbitrary, and becomes a mere social construction.

But this is, of course, an outcome that any civilized person will vehemently reject, and this is because he has a moral consciousness. And so the result is that of the half-hearted atheist: too cowardly to accept the full implications of his dog-eat-dog, evolutionary worldview, in which man is an insignificant spec in the unbridgeable vastness of the universe; and yet he also lacks the courage to face the responsibility of a real “heaven of ideas” and an “infinite and perfect consciousness” governing it.

“And as a result,” Sartre concludes, “man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to.”

Some things come hand-in-hand with each other: either eat your cake, or have it. Anything else is merely polluting the serious intellectual realm with child-like, mix-matched, and ill-thought-out world views.

10 Responses

I agree, insofar as the majority of atheism one find out there today is intellectually lazy. This in turn reveals a sort of existential laziness, a complete lack of self-reflection. The majority of outspoken atheists these days seem to regard God as some kind of big man in the sky, missing the significance of what exactly is meant by “God”. They are headed over an abyss without ever realizing there is no solid footing underneath them.

Having said that, I wonder if one could argue for a sort of “natural law” morality, which stems from the being of things? In other words, because things are the way that they are (regardless of how they got that way), we are obligated to act a certain way toward them?

And while from a purely naturalistic perspective, the human being is an “insignificant spec in the unbridgeable vastness of the universe”, so what? What has size to do with human importance? Do obese people become more important because they take up more space in the big scheme of things?

Lastly, I think Sartre’s concluding statement: “Man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to” to be remarkable interesting from a Buddhist/Daoist perspective, which would say: “Yes. That is precisely the point. There is nothing to cling to, and it is this desire to cling to something that causes unhappiness.” Of course, this is probably in a different sense than how Sartre meant to pose that, and while I think Daoism and Buddhism are “existential” in many ways, I’d hesitate before classifying them as “atheistic” (although they are often spoken of in that way).

Thank you for the affirmation. I like your phrasing: “Intellectually lazy”. It’s what it is.
As for an argument of morality from a naturalistic world view, I have tried to make the argument, but there is still this huge gap that I have been unable to bridge between the descriptive: “is” to the normative “should be”. This is, of course, absolutely central, as morality is basically based on the word “ought”.
As for calling mandkind a “spec”, I did not mean physical size, but rather was trying to emphasize his ultimate helplessness in the face of a universe that he cannot control.
I too have often heard Buddhism called “atheist”, and though it lacks a central “God” figure in the same way as a Judeo-Christian religion, the atheism I was referring to is the entirely mechanistic one, the one that turns its nose up at any sort of “spiritual” connotations.

Yes, good post. We have become increasingly dependent on science to give us answers. We don’t want to work for answers any more, and we can’t stand doubt or thinking that we will just never know. We want something scientific to simplify everything for us.

I love Kurt Vonnegut’s book Cat’s Cradle. There is a scene at a bar where someone says they read in the paper that scientists had figure out the meaning of life, but all the person can remember is that it had something to do with protein.

People want something that simple. The idea of God and the implications that brings is too complex. Even the majority of the religious want God simplified to the point of quick sound bites that leave little to think about it.

Ah yes, the perennial problem of the “is” and the “ought”. At risk of sounding like (ick!) an Objectivist, I can’t help but wonder if this is a pseudo-problem? Why shouldn’t a given “is” imply an “ought”?

Good point about size in terms of helplessness. That fits in nicely with Sartre’s famously dismal characterization of the human being as “the useless passion to be God”. I wonder, though, if that’s a problem only so long as we wish to control the universe?

I think maybe a good term for Buddhism, Daoism, and similiar outlooks is “non-theistic” as opposed to “atheistic”. I know of at least one person who’s adopted this terminology, and suggests it’s akin to the distinction between the term “non-rational” and the term “irrational”.

Oh, and I completely agree with you, wilsonknut, about the problem of scientism. For some reason most people seem to think a question is only meanginful if it can be answered “objectively” by empirical science.

I’m more inclined toward the opposite, actually: I think the most important questions can’t be answered “objectively”, but must be answered “subjectively”. Unless I’m mistaken this puts me with both Zachary and with Kierkegaard.

As far as I can see, the is-ought problem is very hard to quantify. First, what “is”?
Second, what “ought” to be?
As far as I can tell, it almost always requires some other standard in order to bridge the gap.

I like your idea of “non-theistic” in order to get away from the connotations associated with “atheistic”.

As for myself and Kierkegaard, the problem of Objective knowledge and subjective mediums is probably what I’ll be writing about in my next entry, so stay tuned.

I am not sure if you are referring to Christianity specifically. Are you? Or is this a broader view?
The thing that must be remembered, at least in terms of Christianity for example, is that human society lived for well over 5000 years prior to the advent of Christianity with essentially an identical moral code – without a written book (eg. Bible) that many hold as a guide for moral values today. These are morals have always been in existence. Religious people break these morals just as often as the Non-Religious do, however if you are religious you seem to be able to get away with it by “confessing your previous sins” to your god and begging for forgiveness – unless caught and imprisioned by man-made law. If belief in gods were intristic to a peaceful and moral society of humans, we would not have any religious people killing, raping et al. We know this is not the case.

Steakface,
Since Sartre is referring to Christianity, I am too, but it is not really necessary for the argument: all that is necessary is a system whereby some “infinite and perfect consciousness” (i.e., God) can give moral values an a priori existence.

While I appreciate your comment, the fact that Judeo-Christian morals have been around for 5,000-6,000 years does not give them an a priori existence. Without a God, without a “heaven of ideas”, there is no reason whatsoever to use the word “ought”, or to really talk about any moral system as an absolute, or a thing in and of itself.
Yes, religious people break morals as often (or more) as non-religious people, but that is not the point. My argument was concerned with the internal consistency of a given set of beliefs. Being an atheist and considering moral values to have an a priori existence is an inconsistency. On the contrary, Christianity, for example, does not have this problem.
That is what I meant.
But thank you for your input.

Steakface, you bring up an interesting point, but it’s also important to keep in mind the significance of Greco-Roman philosophy on Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought.

Judeo-Christian-Islamic morals do not exist solely as an irrational attachment to a set of books—-more specifically, “Christian Morality” inolves a rational connection with what post-modernists call a “transcendental signifier”, or what Zachary refers to as a “Heaven of Ideas”.

Plato certainly thought there was a “Heaven of Ideas” although it is debateable whether he believed in anything resembling the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. However the two are not necessarily opposed, and in any case, both provide a grounding for morality.

You don’t have to be Christian to have morality, but there must be a “transcendental signifier” (not necessarily God) of some sort. This is something the “Pop Atheists” like Dawkins et al. don’t seem to consider. This seems to be Zachary‘s point (please correct me if I’m wrong, Zachary).